The best, most practical rundown of ways to get your point across in a work environment. Especially number one.
★ 10 notes
user experience
Posts about user experience
December 5th, 2011
October 3rd, 2011
Gilmore and Pine put forth this interesting concept, that the most valuable thing in products today is: are they real? are they authentic? Which is a bold hypothesis. And then they go further and they say, “Well, now why is it? Why now? It didn’t always used to be this way. Certainly it’s not what sold stuff in the ’80s, right? It wasn’t authenticity and reality that sold stuff then.
January 28th, 2010
More on delight, the fleeting feeling
Related to this post on the magic of the iPad, here’s more on delight from Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun in Game Design. Emphasis mine:This is good to keep in mind the next time you read an article berating you for not continually taking pleasure in the “magic” of some device or another. Your brain simply isn’t equipped to be continually delighted by one thing over and over again.Aesthetic appreciation is the most interesting form of enjoyment. Science fiction writers call it “sensawunda.” It’s awe, it’s mystery, it’s harmony. I call it delight. Aesthetic appreciation, like fun, is about patterns. The difference is that aesthetics is about recognizing patterns, not learning new ones.
Delight strikes when we recognize patterns but are surprised by them. It’s the moment at the end of Planet of the Apes when we see the Statue of Liberty. It’s the thrill at the end of the mystery novel when everything falls into place. It’s looking at the Mona Lisa and seeing that smile hovering at the edge of known expressions and matching it to our hypothesis of what she’s thinking. It’s seeing a beautiful landscape and thinking all is right in the world.
Why does a beautiful landscape make us feel that way? Because it meets our expectations, and exceeds them. We find things beautiful when they are very close to our idealized image of what they should be but with an additional surprising wrinkle. A perfectly closed off plot, with just a couple of loose threads. A picture of a farmhouse, but the paint is peeling. Music that comes back to the tonic note and then drops a whole step further to end on an unresolved minor seventh. It sends us chasing off after new patterns.
Beauty is found in the tension between our expectation and the reality. It is only found in settings of extreme order. Nature is full of extremely ordered things. The flowerbed bursting its boundaries is expressing the order of growth, the order of how living things stretch beyond their boundaries, even as it is in tension with the order of the well-manicured walkway.
Delight, unfortunately, doesn’t last. It’s like the smile from a beautiful stranger in a stairwell - it’s fleeting. It cannot be otherwise - recognition is not an extended process.
You can regain delight by staying away from the object that caused it previously, then returning. You’ll get that recognition again. But it’s not quite what I would call fun. It’s something else - our brains rewarding us for having learned well. It is the epilogue to the story. The story itself is the fun of learning.
A person may delight you, for example, all of your life, but they will delight you with new and interesting things, or by doing one thing rarely.
—Timoni
September 1st, 2009
Slideshow: Designing For Social Traction by Joshua Porter.
Great stuff in here; definitely worth at least one read-through.
May 13th, 2009
Collection of default avatars from around the internet.
April 24th, 2009
Fog Creek explicitly recognizes that many good software engineers have no desire whatsoever to do “management” or to take on a formal personnel management role. One of the purposes of the Fog Creek Professional Ladder is to create a career path with promotions for engineers who simply do not want to do management stuff at all. We want to avoid the trap that many companies fall into of forcing good programmers to stop programming and start managing people, if that’s not what they want to do.
[ Fog Creek Compensation - Joel on Software ]
This is very practical. I dread the day I have to add managerial responsibilities to my job (which I love!) in order to make more money.
April 15th, 2009
Another thing that news feeds create are timeliness. Sites like Facebook have always had things happening on them. Users were always making friends, joining groups, and writing comments, but all this was hidden. With news feeds, these sites that once seemed somewhat static now seem to be bustling with activity, and timeliness are a critical ingredient to creating a destination.
[ Engaging Users with News Feeds, via Intelligent Experience Design ]
April 7th, 2009
Beautiful site design with a really cool nav scheme.
